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Swearing and Cursing

 

One persistent criticism of Summerhill is that the children swear. It is true that they swear saying old English words is swearing. It is true that any new pupil will swear more than is necessary.

 

At our General School Meeting, a girl of thirteen who came from a convent was always being brought up on charges for shouting out the phrase son of a bitch when she went sea bathing. It was impressed upon her that she only swore when bathing at a public beach, with strangers around, and that therefore she was showing off. As one boy put it to her, “You are just a silly little goose. You swear in order to show off in front of people, and you claim to take pride that Summerhill is a free school. But you do just the opposite; you make people look down on the school.”

 

I explained to her that she was really trying to do the school harm because she hated it. “But I don’t hate Summerhill:’ she cried, “It’s a terrific place.”

 

“Yes:’ I said, “it is, as you say, a terrific place, but you aren’t in it. You are still living in your convent, and you have brought all your hate of the convent and your hate of the nuns with you. You still identify Summerhill with the hated convent. It isn’t really Summerhill you are trying to damage--it’s the convent.” But she went on shouting out her special phrase until Summerhill became a real place to her and not a symbol. After that, she stopped swearing.

 

Swearing is of three kinds: sexual, religious and excremental. In Summerhill, the religious type of swearing is no problem because the children are not taught religion. Now most children and most adults swear. The army is famous for what a character of Kipling’s called “the adjective.” At most universities and clubs, the students use a sexual and an excremental lingo. Schoolboys swear secretly, and they tell dirty stories. The difference between Summerhill and a prep school is that in the one children swear openly; in the other, secretly.

 

It is always the new pupils who make swearing a problem in Summerhill. Not that the old pupils have saintly tongues, but the old-timers swear at the right time, so to speak. They use conscious control and are careful not to offend outsiders.

 

Our juniors have an interest in the old English word for feces. They use it a lot, that is, the ones from polite homes do. I mean homes that talk of No. 2 and making b.m’s. Children like Anglo-Saxon words. More than one child has asked me why it is wrong to say shit in public, but right to say feces or excrement. I’m baffled to know.

 

Kindergarten children, when free from molding, have a vocabulary that is largely excremental. Summerhill youngsters, aged four to seven, take joy in shouting out shit and piss. I realize that most of them were rigidly toilet-trained as babies, and that they are therefore likely to have complexes about natural functions. Yet one or two of them were raised in self-regulation, and had no disciplined training in cleanliness, were not subjected to taboos or words like naughty or dirty, experienced no hiding of adult nakedness, nor big to-do about toilet functions. These self-regulated children seem to have the same delight in using the Saxon words that their disciplined friends have. So it does not seem to be true that freedom to swear automatically takes all attraction away from obscene words. Our little children use such words freely and without proper context; whereas when older boys or grown girls swear, they use the words as an adult would--that is, appropriately.



 

Sex words are more commonly used than are excremental words. Our children have no feeling that toilets are funny things. Their lack of repression about excrement makes reference to it rather dull and matter-of-fact. It is different with sex. Sex is such an important part of life that its vocabulary pervades our whole life. In its mentionable form, we see it in practically every song and dance: either My Red Hot Mamma or When I Get You Alone Tonight.

 

Children accept swearing as a natural language. Adults condemn it because their own obscenity is greater than that of children. Only an obscene person will condemn obscenity. I imagine that if a parent brought up a baby to believe that the nose was dirty and evil, the child would whisper the word nose in dark corners.

 

Parents must ask themselves the question, “Shall I allow my children to swear openly, or shall I permit them to be obscene in dark dirty corners.” There is no halfway. The hush-hush way leads in adulthood to the tiresome stories of traveling salesmen. The open way leads to a clear, clean interest in all life. At a venture, I say that our former pupils have the cleanest minds in England.

 

Yet the anti-life, disapproving relatives or neighbors who condemn swearing in children have to be met with at one time or another. In the case of Zoe, we have found that she accepts a rational explanation of the behavior of outsiders. Some child taught her the word that the law will not let us print. When we were interviewing a prospective parent--a conventional businessman-she was trying unsuccessfully to fit some toy together and at each failure she exclaimed, “Oh, f- it!” Later, we told her (quite wrongly I think now) that some people did not like that word, and that she should not use it when visitors were present. She said, “Okay.”

 

A week later, she was doing something difficult to accomplish. She looked up and asked a teacher. “Are you a visitor?”

 

The lady replied, “Of course not!”

 

Zoe gave a sigh of relief and cried, “Oh, f- it!”

 

I have seen many a child, who was free at home to say what he liked, ostracized by other homes. We can’t possibly keep Tommy to the party because we can’t have our children corrupted by his awful language. To be outlawed is a painful punishment. Therefore one must pay heed to the taboos of the outside world and guide the child accordingly. But the guidance must be without punitive censuring.

 

 

Censorship

 

How much should we censor a child’s reading? On my office bookshelves are various books on psychology and sex. Any child is free to borrow them at any time. Yet I doubt if more than one or two have ever shown any interest in them. Not one boy or girl has ever asked for Lady Chatterley’s Lover; or Ulysses, or Krafjt-Ebing, and only one or two seniors have borrowed the Encyclopedia of Sex Knowledge.

 

One time, however, a new pupil a girl of fourteen took A Young Girl’s Diary from my bookshelf. I saw her sit and snigger over it. Six months later, she read it a second time and told me that it was rather dull. What had been spicy reading to ignorance had become commonplace reading to knowledge. This girl came to Summerhill with a dirty ignorance whispered in classroom corners. Of course, I cleared her up about sex matters. Prohibition always makes children read books on the sly.

 

In our young days we had our reading censored, so that our great ambition was to get hold of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, or Rabelais, or translations of French yellow backs. In other words, censorship was used as a criterion for selecting the most interesting books.

 

Censorship is feeble inasmuch as it does not protect anyone take James Joyce’s book Ulysses, once forbidden in England and the United States, but then purchasable in Paris or Vienna. It contains words that are usually described as obscene. A naive reader would not understand the words; a sophisticated reader, knowing them already, could not be corrupted. I remember a school principal criticizing me because I introduced The Prisoner of Zenda into the school library. Surprised, I asked why. He said that the opening chapters dealt with illegitimacy. I had read the book twice and had not noticed this fact.

 

Children’s minds seem to be cleaner than that of adults. A boy can read Tom Jones and fail to see the obscene passages. If we free the child from ignorance about sex, we destroy the danger in any book. I am strongly against censorship of books at any age.

 

It is when we leave sex and go to fear that censorship of books becomes a more difficult problem. Such a terrifying book as Bram Stoker’s Dracula might have a sad effect on a neurotic child, and I would not deliberately leave this book in reach of such a child. Yet because my work is to try to analyze the roots of fears, I would not forbid a child to read it. Rather, I would attack the symptoms raised by reading the book.

 

As a child, I recall being terrified by the biblical story of the children who were eaten by bears, yet no one advocates the censorship of the Bible. Many children read the Bible searching for obscene passages. As a small boy I knew them all, chapter and verse. It strikes me now that my fear of the bears may have been the result of my conscience pricking me concerning other parts of the Bible.

 

We are inclined to exaggerate the effect of bloodthirsty stories on children. Most children can enjoy the most sadistic tales. On Sunday nights, when I tell my pupils adventure stories in which they are rescued at the last moment from the cannibal’s cauldron, they jump for joy.

 

It is the supernatural story that is most likely to terrify. Most children fear ghosts, especially children from religious homes. Here, as in sex matters, the proper method is to abolish the fear rather than to censor the book. I grant that it is difficult to lay ghosts in the soul, but the teacher or the doctor must try to lay them. The parent’s duty is to see that the ghosts do not enter the child’s soul.

 

No parents should ever read their children stories of cruel giants and wicked witches. Some hesitate to read a story such as Cinderella on the ground that this tale has the wrong moral: Be a drudge without the ability to rise above cinders, and a fairy godmother will give you a prince for a husband. But what harmful effect can Cinderella have on a healthy child!

 

The percentage of crime stories on any railway bookstall is high. When a boy of sixteen shoots a policeman, a million or two readers do not see that he is living out the kind of fantasy they read about and enjoy. The thriller denotes our inability to play, to fantasy, to create; fundamentally, it touches our repressed hate and desire to injure and to kill.

 

Going to the movies and reading books are in different categories. What is written is not so terrifying as what is seen or heard. Some films instill children with terror, and one is never sure where and when something frightening in the movie may arise. There is so much brutality on the screen. Men punch each other in the jaw and sometimes they even hit women. Newsreels display boxing and wrestling contests. To complete the sadistic picture, there are films dealing with bullfighting. I have seen young children afraid of the crocodile or the pirates in Peter Pan. Bambi is a charming story, so humane and loving that I cannot understand how anyone can shoot a deer for mere sport after seeing the movie. Children love it although some of them cry in fear when the hunters’ dogs attack Bambi. Accordingly, a parent is justified in banning certain films for his young child.

 

It is questionable whether sex films are harmful to most children. Certainly, such films do not harm free children. My pupils have seen the French film La Ronde without much emotion or any bad effects. That is because children see what they want to see.

 

A film story without sex will not thrive at the box office. Sex movies take more of the national income than books and music. Cosmetics sell better than concert tickets. But we must remember that, underneath the mentionable form of sex there is always the unmentionable. Behind the bridal carriage, the old shoe, and the rice are the unmentionable things that these symbolize.

 

The popularity of films is due to the escapist aspect in us all, and that is why producers almost always give us sumptuous sets and magnificent costumes. Amidst all this luxury, the villainous characters get it in the neck and the virtuous ones live happily ever afterward.

 

Recently, we saw a film about a man who sold his soul to the devil. The children unanimously agreed that the devil looked very much like me. I always become the devil to boys who have been taught that the sex sin is the sin against the Holy Ghost. When I tell them that there is nothing sinful about the body; they look upon me as a tempting devil. To neurotic children I represent both God and the devil. One little chap took up a hammer to kill the devil one day. Helping neurotics can be a dangerous life.

 

To censor a child’s companionship is too difficult in most cases. I think it should be done only when a neighboring child is cruel or bullying. Luckily, most children are naturally selective, and sooner or later they find suitable companions.


 

FIVE

CHILDREN’S PROBLEMS

 

Cruelty and Sadism

 

Cruelty is perverted love; this is why extreme sadism is always perverted sexuality. The cruel person cannot give because giving is a love action.

 

There is no instinct for cruelty. Animals are not cruel. A cat does not play with a mouse because it is cruel. It is just a game, and there is no consciousness of any cruelty.

 

In humans, cruelty is due to motives that for the most part, are unconscious. In my long experience with children at Summerhill, I have rarely had a child who wanted to torture animals. There was one exception some years ago. John, thirteen, was given a puppy as a birthday present “He loves animals:’ his mother had written. As John took little Spot around with him, it soon became clear that he was mistreating the dog. I concluded that he was identifying Spot with his younger brother Jim, his mother’s favorite.

 

One day I saw him beating Spot. I went up to the little dog, stroked it, and said, “Hello, Jim.” Apparently, I made John conscious that he had been venting his hatred of his rival brother on the poor dog. Thereafter, he ceased being cruel to Spot; but I only touched his symptom; I didn’t cure his sadism.

 

Free, happy children are not likely to be cruel. The cruelty of many children springs from the cruelty that has been practiced on them by adults. You cannot be beaten without wishing to beat someone else. Like the teacher, you select someone who is physically weaker than you. Boys at strict schools are more cruel to each other than are the children at Summerhill.

 

Cruelty invariably is rationalized: it hurts me more than it does you. Few, if any, sadists say frankly, “I beat people up because I get satisfaction in doing it,” although that is the true explanation. They explain away their sadism in moral terms, saying, “I don’t want my boy to be soft. I want him to be able to fit into a world that is going to give him many a nasty blow. I thrash my son because I was thrashed when I was a boy, and it did me a hell of a lot of good.”

 

Parents who beat their children are always ready with such glib explanations. I have never yet met a parent who honestly says, “I hit my kid because I hate him, hate myself, my wife, my job, my relations-in fact, I hate life itself. I hit my son because he is small, and he can’t hit me back I hit him because I am afraid of my boss. When my boss jumps on me, I take it out on the kid at home.”

 

If parents were honest enough to say all this, they would feel no need to be cruel to their children. Cruelty is born of ignorance and self-hatred; cruelty protects the sadist from realizing that his own nature is perverted.

 

In Hitler’s Germany, the torture was inflicted by sexual perverts of the Julius Streicher type; his paper Der Sturmer was full of vile, perverted sex long before concentration camps were erected. Yet many fathers who berate the sexual perversity of the prison sadist do not apply the same reasoning to their own minor sadisms. To beat a child at home or at school is basically the same thing as torturing a Jew in Belsen. If sadism was sexual in Belsen, it is likely to be sexual in school or family.

 

I can hear a mother protest, “Nonsense! Do you mean to say that when I slapped Jimmy’s hand today because he touched the vase from Granny that I was showing sexual perversion?”

 

My reply is, “Yes, to a minor degree. If you are happily married and have a fully satisfying sex life, you will not spank Jimmy. Spanking is literally a hatred of the flesh, and the flesh means the body with all its demands and longings. If you love your own flesh, you won’t want to make Jimmy’s flesh hurt.”

 

Parents can beat their children as much as they please as they don’t leave welts that can be seen in a magistrate’s court. Our criminal code is a long record of cruelty disguised as justice.

 

Mental cruelty is more difficult to cope with than physical cruelty. A municipal law can abolish corporal punishment in schools, but no law can ever reach the person who practices mental cruelty. A cynical or a spiteful parental tongue can do untold damage to a child. We all know fathers who sneer at their sons. Butterfingers, you can’t do a thing without bungling it. Such men likewise show their hatred of their wives by constant criticism. And there are wives who rule husbands and children through browbeating and streams of abuse.

 

A specialized form of mental cruelty is that shown by a father when he takes out his hatred of his wife on the children.

 

Teachers sometimes show cruelty by being supercilious and sarcastic. Such teachers expect to hear roars of laughter from their pupils when they thus torture some poor, cowering child.

 

Children will never be cruel unless they have been forced to repress some strong emotion. Free children have little or no self- hate to express. They do not hate others and are not cruel.

 

Every little bully has had his life warped in some way. Often, he is simply doing to others what has been literally done to him. Every beating makes a child sadistic in desire or practice.

 

Children under suppression are cruel in their jokes. I have hardly ever seen a practical joke played in Summerhill. The ones I have seen were usually engineered by new arrivals from private schools. Sometimes, at the beginning of a term when the children return from the greater suppression of their homes there are displays of teasing--hiding bicycles and so on-but these spells do not last more than a week. In the main, the humor of Summerhill is kindly. The reason is that the children enjoy the approval and love of the teachers; for children are good when the necessity to hate and fear is abolished.

 

Criminality

 

Many psychologists believe that a child is born neither good nor bad, but with tendencies toward both beneficence and criminality. I believe there is no instinct of criminality nor any natural tendency toward malevolence in the child. Criminality appears in a child as a perverted form of love. It is a radical expression of cruelty. It too springs from lack of love.

 

One day, one of my pupils, a boy of nine, was playing a game and was pleasantly crooning to himself, “I want to kill my mother.” It was unconscious behavior, for he was making a beat, and all his conscious interest was directed toward that activity. The fact is that his mother lives her own life, and seldom sees him. She does not love him, and unconsciously he knows it. But this boy--one of the most lovable of children--did not start out in life with criminal thoughts. It is simply the old story: if I can’t get love, I can get hate. Every case of criminality in a child can be traced to lack of love.

 

Another pupil, also nine, had a phobia of poison; he feared that his mother would poison him. When she arose from the table, he watched her every movement; and often he said, “I know what you are after; you are going to get the poison for my food.” I suspected that it was a case of projection. His mother seemed to give more love to his brother; and probably the neurotic son had fantasies of poisoning both his brother and his mother. His fears were probably fears of retribution—I want to poison her, and perhaps she will poison me in revenge.

 

Crime is obviously an expression of hate. The study of criminality in children resolves itself into the study of why a child is led to hate. It is a question of injured ego.

 

We cannot get away from the fact that a child is primarily an egoist. No one else matters. When the ego is satisfied, we have what we call goodness; when the ego is starved, we have what we call criminality. The criminal revenges himself on society because society has failed to appreciate his ego by showing love for him.

 

If humans were born with an instinct for criminality, there would be as many criminals from fine middle-class homes as from slum homes. But well-to-do people have more opportunities for expression of the ego. The pleasures money buys, the refined surroundings, culture, and pride of birth all minister to the ego. Among the poor, the ego is starved. Only a very few poor boys attain distinction. To be a criminal, a gangster, even a bully is one way of attaining distinction.

 

Many people believe that bad films make criminals. It appears to me to be a shortsighted view. I very much doubt that any film ever corrupted anyone. Certainly a film might suggest a method to a youth, but the motive was there before the film came around. The film may make crime more artistic, but it cannot possibly suggest crime to anyone who has not contemplated crime.

 

Crime is, first of all, a family affair; and second a community affair. Most of us who will be honest will admit that we have killed off our families in fantasy. I had one girl pupil who gave them most horrible deaths--especially her mother.

 

Authority and jealousy are behind many murderous wishes. No child can stand authority. And since so many children are thwarted from the age of four to sixteen, I marvel that there are not more murderers in the world.

 

In a child, the will to power is the will to be admired and loved. The child strives to compel admiration and attention. Thus we find criminal thoughts in introverted children--timid children who have no social gifts. The plain, little girl will weave horrible fantasies of sudden death while her pretty sister is dancing solo before guests.

 

The extrovert has no occasion for hate; he laughs and dances and talks, and the appreciation of his audience satisfies his desire to be admired.

 

The introvert sits in a corner and dreams of what should be. The most introverted boy in my school takes no part in social evenings. He does not dance; he never sings; he never takes part in a tumble game. In his lessons with me, he tells me of a wonderful magician who serves him. He has only to say the word and the magician will give him a Rolls Royce. I told him a story one day in which all the Summerhill children were wrecked on an island. He did not seem to like the story. I asked him to amend it “Make it that I was the only one saved,” he said.

 

We are all familiar with this mechanism-the mechanism of climbing up by knocking the other fellow down. It is the psychology of the talebearer. “Please, sir, Tommy was swearing” means I don’t swear; I am a good boy.

 

The difference between the person who kills rivals in fantasy and the criminal who kills rivals in reality is one of degree. In so far as we are all more or less starved for love, we are all potential criminals. I used to flatter myself that I cured children of criminal fantasies by my psychological methods, but I now believe that the credit should go to love. To pretend that I love a new pupil would be fatuous; yet the child feels that I love him because I respect his ego.

 

To allow a child the freedom to be himself is the real cure for criminality. I learned that years ago when I went to see Homer Lane’s Little Commonwealth. He gave delinquent children the freedom to be themselves, and they became good. In the slums, the only way delinquents have of satisfying their egos is to draw attention to themselves by antisocial behavior. Lane told me that he saw some criminal boys at their trials look proudly around the court. In a farming community with Lane, these boys found new values, social values - that is, good values. To me the demonstration on that Dorset farm was convincing proof that there is no original will to criminality.

 

I think of the new boy who ran away. Lane chased him and caught him. The boy, accustomed to cuffs, put up a protective arm. Lane smiled and slipped some money into his hand.

 

“What’s this for?” stammered the boy. “Take the train home, man,” said Lane; “don’t walk.” The boy returned to the Commonwealth that night.

 

I think of that way, and I think of the stern methods of most reform schools. It is the law that makes the crime. The law at home voiced by father’s forbidding commands curbs the ego of the child; and in curbing that ego makes the child bad. The law of the state merely revives the unconscious memories of the home restraint.

 

Suppression awakens defiance, and defiance naturally seeks revenge. Criminality is revenge. To abolish crime, we must abolish the things that make a child want vengeance. We must show love and respect for the child.

 

Stealing

 

Two kinds of stealing should be distinguished: stealing by a normal child and stealing by a neurotic child.

 

A natural, normal child will steal. He simply wants to satisfy his acquisitive urge; or with his friends he wants the adventure. He has not yet made the distinction between mine and thine. Many Summerhill children engage in this kind of stealing up to a certain age. They are free to live out this stage.

 

Speaking to a number of schoolmasters about their orchards, I have had them tell me that their pupils take most of the fruit. Now we have a large garden at Summerhill filled with fruit trees and bushes, but our children rarely steal the fruit. Some time ago, two boys were charged at a General School Meeting with pinching fruit. They were new boys. When their consciences were abolished, they had no further interest in fruit stealing.

 

School thieving is for the most part a communal affair. The communal theft would suggest that adventure plays an important part in stealing; not only adventure, but also showing off, enterprise, and leadership.

 

Only occasionally does, one see the lone crook--always a sly boy with an angelic innocence all over his face, who gets away with much because at Summerhill there is no gang rat to betray him. No, you can never tell a young thief by his face. Indeed, I have a boy with such an innocent smile and such clear, blue, guileless eyes that I have a good suspicion that he is not entirely ignorant of the whereabouts of a certain can of fruit that disappeared from the school larder last night.

 

However, I have seen many a child who would steal at the age of thirteen grows up to be an honest citizen. The truth seems to be that children take a much longer time to grow up than we have been accustomed to think. By growing up I mean becoming a social being.

 

The child is primarily an egoist-generally until the commencement of puberty, and until then, he generally hasn’t the art of identifying himself with others. The concept of mine and thine is adult: the youngster will develop this sense when he becomes mature.

 

If children are loved and free, in time they will become good and honest. This sounds like a simple dictum, but I am aware of the many snags that crop up in practice.

 

In Summerhill, I cannot leave the icebox or the moneybox unlocked. At Summerhill School Meetings, children accuse others of breaking open their trunks. Even one thief can make a community lock-and-key conscious; and there are few communities of youth that are completely honest. Fifty-five years ago, I dared not leave a book in my overcoat pocket in the students’ room of the university; and I have heard rumors that some members of Parliament hesitate to have valuables in coats and briefcases.

 

Honesty would appear to be an acquired characteristic that appeared late in man’s development with the advent of private property. Possibly the fact, which makes most for honesty is fear. It is not abstract honesty that prevents me from cheating on my income tax; it is fear that the game isn’t worth the candle, that the disgrace following detection would ruin reputation and work and home.

 

When there is a law against anything, it must be taken for granted that the law has been made because of a tendency to transgress. In a country with total prohibition, there would be no law against driving a car when under the influence of alcohol. The many laws in all countries against stealing, robbery, swindling, and so on, are based on the belief that people will steal when they can. This is true.

 

After all, most adults are more or less dishonest. There are few people who will not smuggle something through customs, still fewer who will not cheat on their income tax return. Yet almost anyone is genuinely upset if his son steals a penny.

 

On the other hand, in their dealings with each other, most people are pretty honest. It would be easy to slip one of your hostess’s silver spoons into your pocket if you thought of doing so. You don’t think of doing so but you might think of using a return ticket that the collector forgot to punch and collect. Adults make a distinction between the individual and the organization, whether it be a state organization or a private one. It’s all right to cheat the insurance company, but reprehensible to cheat the grocer. Children make no such distinction. They will indiscriminately pinch things from roommates, teachers, and shops. Not all children will act in this way, but many will agree to share the stolen product. This means that you find in middle-class children who are free and happy, the same sort of dishonesty that appears among poorer children.

 

I find that many children will steal when opportunity offers. As a boy I did not steal because I was so thoroughly conditioned. Stealing meant a good walloping when found out, and hell fire for eternity. But children not so thoroughly cowed as I was, will naturally steal. Yet, I insist, that in time and if a child is brought up in love, he will grow out of his stealing stage and mature into an honest man.

 

The second kind of stealing--habitual, compulsive stealing-- is an evidence of neurosis in the child. Stealing by a neurotic child is generally a sign of lack of love. The motive is unconscious. In almost every case of confirmed juvenile stealing, the child feels unloved. His thieving is a symbolic attempt to get something of great value. Whether the theft is one of money or jewelry or what not, the unconscious wish is to steal love. This kind of stealing can be treated only by giving out love to the child. Hence, when I give a boy money for stealing my tobacco, I am aiming at his unconscious feeing, not his conscious thought. He may think that I am a fool, but what he thinks does not matter much; it’s what he feels that matters. And he feels that I am his friend, his approver, and one who gives him love instead of hate. Sooner or later the stealing ceases, for the love that was symbolically stolen in the form of money or goods is now given freely and therefore need not be stolen.

 

In this context I mention the case of a boy who was always riding other children’s bicycles. Brought up before a General School Meeting, he was charged with “constantly breaking the private property rule by using other kids’ bikes.” Verdict: “Guilty!” Punishment: “The community is asked to subscribe to buy him a bicycle.” The Community subscribed.

 

However I must qualify the giving of rewards to a thief. If he is of low mentality, or, worse still if he is emotionally arrested, the reward will not have the desired effect. Or if he has a swelled head, he will not benefit from the symbolic gift. In my work with problem children, I have found that nearly every young thief reacted well to my rewards for stealing. The only failures were the very few who were what one might call conscious crooks, unreachable by therapy or by the disguised therapy of rewards.

 

The situation becomes complicated, however, when the stealing denotes both a lack of parental love and excessive prohibitions about sex. In this category comes kleptomania, the uncontrollable reaching out of the hand for something forbidden-- masturbation. This kind of stealing has the best prognosis when the parents realize their mistake and begin all over again by frankly telling the child that they were wrong in their suppressions. A teacher, unaided by the child’s parents, can seldom cure kleptomania. The best person to remove a prohibition is the one who originally set it.

 

I once had a boy of sixteen sent to my school because he was a bad thief. When he arrived at the station, he gave me the half- fare ticket his father had bought for him in London--a ticket based on understating the boy’s age. I would like to impress upon the parents of a habitually dishonest child that they must first examine themselves, trying to find out what treatment of theirs made the child dishonest.

 

Parents bark up the wrong tree when they blame wicked companions, gangster films, lack of parental control because Daddy was away in the Army, and so on, for their child’s habitual dishonesty. By themselves, these factors will have little or no effect on a child who is brought up naturally about sex and who is given love and approval.

 

I do not know just how much young thieves are benefited by daily or weekly visits to a children’s social clinic. I only know that the methods in such clinics are not harsh or hellish and that the social workers try hard to understand the child and treat him without moral judgment or character scolding. The child psychologist and the probation officer are handicapped in their efforts by the home in which the psychically sick child lives. I conjecture that success results only when the psychologist or the probationist persuades the parents to change their treatment of the child. For young thieves are the acne of youth, the outward signs of a sick body, the sick body of our society. No amount of personal therapy can abolish the evil of a bad home, a slum street, a poverty-stricken family.

 

It is all too true that from the age of five to fifteen, most children are getting an education that goes only to the head. There is hardly any concern with their emotional life. Yet it is the emotional disturbance in a neurotic child that makes him compulsively steal. All his knowledge of school subjects or his lack of knowledge of school subjects plays no part at all in his larceny.

 

The plain fact is that no happy person steals compulsively and continually. The questions to be asked about a habitual thief are: What is his background? Was his home happy? Did his parents always tell him the truth? Did he feel guilty about masturbation? Did he feel guilty about religion? Why was he disrespectful to his parents? Did he feel they did not love him? There must have been some sort of hell inside him to turn him into a thief. Most surely, the hell some of our judges would send him to will not counteract his inner hell.

 

A course of therapy would not necessarily solve the young thief’s problems. Of course, it could help him a lot, could rid him of some of his fears and hates could give him some self-respect. But, as long as the original hate elements remain in his environment he is likely to regress at any time. The therapy of his parents would lead to more success in the end.

 

I once had a biggish boy who was psychically three or four. He stole from shops. I considered going down to a shop with him and stealing in his presence (after squaring the shopkeeper first). To that boy I was father and a God. I was inclined to think that his real father’s disapproval of him had a lot to do with this stealing. My idea was that if he saw his new Father- God stealing, he would be compelled to revise his conscience about stealing. I fully expected him to protest vigorously.

 

In curing the neurotic child of his thieving, I see no other possible method than that of approval. Neurosis is the result of a conflict between what one has been told he must not have and what he really wants. I invariably find that the weakening of this false conscience makes the child happier and better. Abolish a boy’s conscience and you will cure him of thieving.

 

Delinquency

 

In these days of savage assaults with guns and brass knuckles, the authorities are at their wit’s end about juvenile delinquency, and apparently will try anything to curb it. The newspapers tell us of a new method for dealing with the problem. It is a hard method: the sentencing of youngsters to reform schools which have a regimen of strenuous drills with strict punishment for defaulters. One picture I saw shows boys drilling with huge logs on their shoulders. At such oppressive places, there seem to be no privileges.

 

I grant that a few months of this hell may deter some potential delinquents. But such treatment never gets down to root causes, to fundamentals. Much worse, such treatment spells hate to most adolescents and its harshness is bound to create permanent haters of society.

 

Over thirty years ago, Homer Lane proved by his work in a reform camp called the Little Commonwealth that juvenile delinquents can be cured by love - cured by authority being on the side of the child. Lane took tough boys and girls from the London court, antisocial, hard-boiled youngsters glorying in their reputation as muggers, thieves, and gangsters. These “incorrigibles” came to the Little Commonwealth and there they found a community with self-government and loving approval. Gradually, these youngsters became decent, honest citizens, many of whom I used to count among my friends.

 

Lane was a genius in the understanding and handling of delinquent children. He cured them because he constantly gave out love and understanding. He always looked for the hidden motive in any delinquent act, convinced that behind every crime was a wish that originally had been a good one. He found that talking to children was useless and that only action counted. He held that in order to rid a child of a bad social trait one should let the child live out his desires. Once, when one of his young charges, Jabez, expressed an angry wish to smash up the cups and saucers on the tea table. Lane handed him an iron poker and told him to carry on. Jabez carried on--but the very next day he came to Lane and asked for a more responsible and better paying job than he had been working at. Lane asked why he wanted a better-paying job. “Because I want to pay for them cups and saucers,” said Jabez. Lane’s explanation was that the action of smashing the cups brought a load of Jabez’s inhibitions and conflicts tumbling to the ground. The fact that for the first time in his life he was encouraged by authority to smash something and get rid of his anger must have had a beneficial emotional effect on him.

 

The delinquents of Homer Lane’s Little Commonwealth were all from bad city slums, yet I never heard of any of them chiming to gangsterdom. I call Lane’s way the love way. I call giving-the-delinquent-hell the hate way. And since hate never cured anyone of anything, I conclude that the hell way will never help any youngster to be social.

 

Yet I know very well that if I were a magistrate today and I had a tough, sullen delinquent to deal with, I should be baffled to know what to do with him. For there is no reform school in England today like the Little Commonwealth to send him to, and I say so with shame. Lane died in 1925, and our authorities here in England have not learned anything from that remarkable man.

 

However, in recent years, our fine body of probation officers has shown a sincere desire to try to understand the delinquent. The psychiatrists, too, in spite of much hostility from the legal profession, have gone a long way to teach the public that delinquency is not wickedness but rather a form of sickness that requires sympathy and understanding. The tide is flowing toward love instead of toward hate, toward understanding instead of toward bigoted, moral indignation. It is a slow tide. But even a slow tide carries a little of the contamination away; and in time the tide must grow in volume.

 

I know of no proof that a person has ever been made good by violence, or by cruelty, or by hate. In my long career, I have dealt with many problem children, many of them delinquents. I have seen how unhappy and hateful they are, how inferior, how emotionally confused. They are arrogant and disrespectful to me because I am a teacher, a father substitute, and an enemy. I have lived with their tense hate and suspicion. But here in Summerhill, these potential delinquents govern themselves in a self-governing community; they are free to learn and they are free to play. When they steal, they may even be rewarded. They are never preached at, never made afraid of authority, either earthly or heavenly.

 

In a few short years, these same haters will go out into the world as happy, social beings. So far as I know, not one delinquent who spent seven years in Summerhill ever was sent to prison, or ever raped, or ever became antisocial. It is not I who cured them. It is the environment that cures them--for the environment of Summerhill gives out trust, security, sympathy, lack of blame, absence of judgment.

 

Summerhill children do not go on to be criminals and mobsters after they leave the school, because they are allowed to live out their gangsterdom without fear and punishment and moral lectures. They are allowed to grow out of one stage of their development and to pass naturally into the next stage.

 

I simply do not know how an adult criminal would react to love. I am pretty certain that rewarding a gangster for stealing would not cure him, just as I am pretty certain that a prison sentence does not cure him. Treatment is most hopeful only for the very young. Yet even if given to a child as late in life as fifteen years of age, freedom often turns delinquents into good citizens.

 

In Summerhill, we once had a boy of twelve who had been expelled from many schools for being antisocial. In our school this same boy became a happy, creative social boy. The authority of a reform school would have finished him. If freedom can save the far-gone problem child, what could freedom do for the millions of so-called “normal” children who are perverted by the authority of the family?

 

Tommy, aged thirteen, was a bad problem; he stole and was destructive. During one particular vacation, he could not go home, so we kept him at school. For two months, he was the only child at Summerhill. He was perfectly social. We did not have to lock up food or money. But the moment his gang returned, he led the lads in a raid on the larder--which only proves that a child as an individual and a child in a group are two different people.

 

Teachers in reform schools tell me that the antisocial youth is often subnormal in intelligence. I would add, subnormal in emotion, too. There was a time when I considered the delinquent child a bright child with creative energy that had to come out in an antisocial way because there was no positive way for him to express this energy. Make him free from inhibitions and discipline, I thought, and he will most likely turn out to be clever, creative, and even brilliant. I was wrong; sadly wrong. Years of living and dealing with all sorts of delinquents have shown me that they are, for the most part, inferiors. I can think of only one boy who made his mark in later life. Quite a few were cured of being antisocial and dishonest, and they later went to work at regular jobs. But none rose to become a good scholar, or a fine artist, or a skilled engineer, or a talented actress. When the antisocial drive was abolished, for most of these wayward children that seemed to remain only a dead dullness that knew not ambition.

 

When a youth has to remain in a bad environment with ignorant parents, he does not have any chance to live out his antisocialness. The abolition of poverty and slums, combined with the ending of parental ignorance, will automatically thin out the population of the reform school.

 

The ultimate cure for juvenile delinquency lies in curing society of its own moral delinquency, and its concomitant, immoral indifference. We have to take one of two sides, and the two sides are before our eyes. Either we treat delinquent youth in the hateful hell way or we use the method of love.

 

Allow me the delusion, for a few moments, that I am Secretary of the Interior, with infinite powers in the field of education. Let me draft a general program, a tentative “five-year plan” for schools.

 

As Secretary I should abolish all so-called reform schools and substitute coeducational colonies throughout the land. I should at once set up special training centers for staffing these with teachers and housemothers. Each colony would be completely self-governing. The staff would have no special privileges. They would have the sure food and heating as the pupils. Pupils would be paid for any community work they did. The watch-word of the colony would be freedom. No religion, no moralizing, no authority would be tolerated.

 

I would exclude religion because religion talks, it preaches, it tries to sublimate, it suppresses. Religion postulates sin where sin does not exist. It believes in free will when for some children enslaved by their compulsions, there is no free will.

 

In the place of religious conditioning, I would advocate that emotions be conditioned by love and by nothing that is cruel and unjust. There would be only one way to reach this ideal in the colony--by letting the young people alone as much as possible, by freeing them from imposed authority, and from hate, and from punishment I know from experience that this is the only way.

 

Teachers would be taught to be the equals of pupils, not the superiors. They would retain no protective dignity, no sarcasm. They would inspire no fear. They would have to be men and women of infinite patience, able to see far ahead, willing to trust in ultimate results.

 

Even though present society would not permit a full love life in this day and age, the mixing of the sexes would lead to much that is valuable, to tenderness, to natural good manners, to a necessary knowledge of the opposite sex, to the lessening of pornography and leering snickers.

 

The chief characteristic of the state would be the ability to show trust in the pupils, to treat them as respect-worthy and not as thieves and destroyers. At the same time the staff would have to be realistic and not give the individual too much to chew at one time, such as appointing a thief as treasurer of the colony’s Christmas parry fund. The staff would have to curb any temptation to lecture by realizing that action counts far more than talk. They would be required to know the history of each delinquent, his whole background.

 

Intelligence tests would have a minor place in the colony. They do not denote potentials that are vital. They do not correctly assess emotions, creativity, originality, and imagination.

 

The general atmosphere would be that of a hospital rather than that of an institution. Just as no medical man assumes a moral attitude toward a patient with syphilis, so our staff would assume no moral attitude toward the sickness we call delinquency. The colony would differ from a hospital only in that there would usually be no administering of medicines or drugs --even psychological ones. The cure would result only from the presence of genuine love in the environment. The staff would also have to evidence genuine faith in human nature. True, there would be failures and incurables. Society would still have to reckon with them. But they would form a tiny minority, while the majority of delinquents would respond to love and tolerance and trust.

 

I would keep reminding the cynically-minded of Homer Lane’s story of the delinquent boy he interviewed at a London juvenile court. Lane handed him a pound note out of which he was to pay his fare to a nearby town, knowing that the boy would bring him the exact change. He did. [I remind American readers that Lane was born in New England.]

 

I would keep on reminding such people of the American prison warden who sent a lifer to New York to buy new machinery for the prison shoemaking shop. He returned with a full account of the new machines he had bought. The warden asked, “Why didn’t you grab the chance to take off in New York?” The convict scratched his head, “I dunno, warden, I guess it was because you trusted me.”

 

Prisons and punishment can never be a substitute for this wonderful trust in people. Such a trust signifies to the person in trouble that someone is giving him love and not hate.

 

Curing the Child

 

Curing depends on the patient more than it does on the therapist. There are so many failures among people who go to therapy because they have been bullied by relatives into going. If for instance, a man succeeds in sending a reluctant wife to be analyzed, she quite naturally goes with a grudge. My husband doesn’t think me good enough. He wants me to be changed, and I don’t like it.

 

The same difficulty applies to the young criminal when, under duress, he is compelled to undergo therapy. Therapy for both adolescents and adults must be desired by the patient. Freedom alone, with no therapy added, will cure most delinquencies in a child.

 

Freedom-not license--not sentimentality. Freedom alone will not cure pathological cases. It will barely touch cars of arrested development. But freedom will work when it is practiced in a children’s boarding school--provided it is practiced all the time.

 

Some years ago, I had a youth sent to me who was a real crook who stole cleverly. A week after his arrival, I received a telephone message from Liverpool. “This is Mr. X [a well- known man in England] speaking. I have a nephew at your school. He has written me asking if he can come to Liverpool for a few days. Do you mind?”

 

“Not a bit,” I answered, “but he has no money. Who will pay his fare? Better get in touch with his parents.”

 

The following afternoon the boy’s mother called me up and said that she had received a phone call from Uncle Dick. So far as she and her husband were concerned, Arthur could go to Liverpool. They had looked up the fare and it was twenty-eight and would I give Arthur two pounds ten? Arthur had put through both calls from a local phone booth. His imitation of his old uncle’s voice and of his mother’s voice was perfect. He had tricked me, and I had given him the money before I was conscious of having been taken.

 

I talked it over with my wife. We both agreed that the wrong thing to-do would be to demand the money back, for he had been subjected to that kind of treatment for years. My wife suggested rewarding him. I agreed I went up to his bedroom late at night “You’re in luck today:’ I said cheerfully.

 

“You bet I am,” he said.

 

“Yes, but you are in greater luck than you know,” I said.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Oh, your mother has just telephoned again,” I said easily. “She says that she made a mistake about the fare: it isn’t twenty-eight shillings- it’s thirty-eight shillings. So she asked me to give you another ten” I carelessly threw a ten-shilling note on his bed, and departed before he could say anything.

 

He went to Liverpool next morning, leaving a letter to be given to me after the train had gone. It began: “Dear Neill, you are a greater actor than I am” And for weeks he kept asking me why I had given him that ten-shilling note.

 

One day, I answered him: “How did you feel when I gave it to you?” He thought hard for a minute and then he said slowly: “You know, I got the biggest shock of my life. I said to myself: ‘Here is the first man in my life who has been on my side.’ “Here was a case of a boy’s being conscious of the love that is approval. Usually this consciousness takes a long time in coming. The subject of therapy may only dimly apprehend its effect, and that not until months later.

 

In past days, when I had much more to do with bad delinquents, I again and again rewarded them for stealing. But it was only after a few years, only after the child was cured, that he had any realization of the fact that my approval had helped.

 

In dealing with children, one must get down to depth psychology, seek deep motives for behavior. A boy is antisocial. Why? Naturally, his symptoms obtrude and irritate. He may be a bully; perhaps a thief; perhaps a sadist. But why? The teacher’s irritation may make him storm and punish and condemn; but after the teacher has expressed all his irritation, the problem remains unsolved. The present trend demanding the revival of strict disciplinary teaching will treat only symptoms and in the end will affect nothing.

 

Parents bring a girl to Summerhill who is a liar, a thief, a catty creature. They give me a long description of her faults. It would be fatal for me to let the child know that I have been told about her. I must wait until it comes from the girl herself, from her behavior toward me or others here at the school.

 

Years ago I had a bad problem child. His parents insisted on his being examined by a psychiatrist. So I took him up to a well- known doctor in Harley Street. I spent half an hour telling the specialist all about the case, and then we had the boy brought in. “Mr. Neill tells me you are a very bad boy,” said the doctor sternly. That was his version of psychology.

 

Again and again I have seen similar false and ignorant approaches to children. “You aren’t very big for your age,” said a visitor to a boy who had an inferiority complex about his size.

 

Another visitor said to a girl, “Your sister is very clever, isn’t she?” The art of dealing with children might be defined as knowing what not to say.

 

On the other hand, it is necessary to show a child that you are not deceived. To let a child go on stealing your stamps is useless; you must always let him know that you know. What is unpardonable is to say, “Your mother told me you steal stamps.” This is quite different from saying, “I know you’ve taken my stamps.”

 

I am always a little nervous in writing to parents about their children, fearing that they may leave my letter lying around when the child is home on vacation. Even more, I fear that they will write their children, saying, “Neill says you are not going to classes and are being a general nuisance this term” If that happens, the child will never have any trust in me. So, usually, I tell as little as possible, unless I know the parents are absolutely trustworthy and aware.

 

I generally do the right thing with a child because my long experience has shown me the right way. No cleverness about it, no special gift, just practice ...with possibly a blind eye for the unessential, the by-products.

 

Bill, a new boy, has stolen some money from another child. The victim asks me, “Should I charge him in our next General Meeting?”

 

Without, thinking, I say, “No. Leave it to me.” I can reason it out later. Bill is new to freedom, uneasy in his new environment. He has been trying so hard to make himself popular and accepted by his fellows that he has been swaggering and shaving off a great deal. To make his theft public would be to give him shame, fear, followed perhaps by defiance and an outbreak of antisocial behavior. Or it might work the other way, for if he had been a gang leader in his last school, proud of secret destructive actions against the staff, a public accusation might make him crow and show off what a tough guy he was.

 

Another time a child says, “I am going to charge Mary for stealing my crayons,” and I am not interested. I do not consciously think of it at the time, but I know that Mary has been in the school for two years and can handle the situation.

 

A new boy of thirteen, who has been hating lessons all his life, comes to Summerhill and loafs for weeks. Then, bored, he comes to me and says, “Shall I go to lessons?” I answer, “That has nothing to do with me,” because he must find his own inner compulsions. But to another child I might reply, “Yes, a good idea:’ because her home and school life, built on a timetable have made her incapable of deciding anything, and I have to wait until she gradually becomes self-reliant I do not consciously think of these individual aspects when I reply. Love is being on the side of the other person.

 

Love is approval. I know that children learn slowly that freedom is some- thing totally different from license. But they can learn this truth and do learn it. In the end, it works--nearly every time.

 


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 682


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